“Not everything is successful.”

While he is currently able to find a market for every bit of kale harvested from his farm, Kim Martin stresses that investment in such progressive vegetable varieties is often fraught with risk and sometimes failure.

“The work you do in the early stages is just investing in product development and hopefully at some point in time it starts to pay the bills.”

He frequently travels and looks abroad in the hope of pre-empting local trends.

“I travel a bit around the world [for] that opportunity to see a product performing in a marketplace where it doesn’t currently exist in Australia, and then basically you just steal shamelessly.

“You take from what you see working elsewhere, then you start small in your marketplace and work from there.

"You build your market up, you listen to what your customers are saying, and you react."